Yesterday, Rebecca Pow MP attended the launch of a new network to support innovation by farmers. ‘Innovative Farmers’ gives farmers research support and funding on their own terms. In a world where most agricultural research happens off-farm, this puts farmers firmly in the driving seat.

The network is part of the Duchy Future Farming Programme, funded by the Prince of Wales’s Charitable Foundation. The Soil Association, Organic Research Centre and Waitrose have been partners in the programme and are now joined by LEAF (Linking Environment and Farming) and Innovation in Agriculture, ensuring that the new network represents farmers and growers across the industry.  

Innovative Farmers recognises that many of the best ideas in farming come from farmers. They trial, test and analyse, often in isolation. The not-for-profit network matches farmer groups with some of the UK’s best research teams. It provides professional support, a web portal where groups share their learning, and access to a dedicated research fund. The partners aim to award more than £800,000 to farmer groups by 2020, allowing farmers to investigate techniques that will really make a difference on the ground.

Currently more than 750 farmers are involved, running field labs on 35 different topics. At the heart of the network are ‘field labs’, where farmers meet in small groups to test and develop new ways of tackling a shared problem or opportunity.

The network focuses on finding sustainable answers to farmers’ practical problems, from managing weeds and pests with fewer chemicals to testing more sustainable animal feeds. Field labs have already tackled topics from reducing antibiotic use in dairy farming to methods in controlling blackgrass, with farmers driving investigations.

Rebecca said

In order to produce more food for this country and in order to produce it as sustainably as possible science and technology has a crucial role to play. I fully support this grass roots method of research where farmers are really getting the answers they need through innovative techniques and sharing ideas. Whilst traditional methods still have a prominent role to play new solutions must be combined with existing tools and sharing best practice through established networks is an excellent way to go about this.